Amazon.com (ISBN 0609806858, Paperback)

If Bridget Jones could sculpt--well, forget it. Bridget and Sam Jones, Lauren Henderson's snappy artist heroine, share only surface similarities. They're young, English, and sexy, but Sam has a better sense of humor--dead-on and wicked--and a better wardrobe, which runs mostly to latex. In her third U.S.-published adventure after Black Rubber Dress and Freeze My Margarita, she lands in lower Manhattan with her first group show at an important gallery in SoHo. But the natives seem restless. First someone trashes the work of another gallery artist, the unpleasant (and according to Sam, untalented) stepmother of her girlhood pal, and then two of the gallery's employees are garroted to death. Sam is still suffering from culture shock. It's her first trip to New York, and her sardonic asides on Manhattan's unique denizens are worth the plot-skimpy narrative. But when she gets a bead on the killer, she finds herself too close for comfort to the deadly wire.

Sam goes to extremes--in her dress, sex life, and drug use--but she's as cheeky as a London tabloid. New readers will want to track down her previous books, in which she's on her home turf. If you liked Absolutely Fabulous, you'll love Strawberry Tattoo. And if you're looking for other independent-minded female sleuths like Henderson's Sam Jones, Sparkle Hayter's Robin Hudson, Katy Munger's Casey Jones, and Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan, check out Tartcity.com, a Web site devoted to tart noir, a genre composed of "neofeminist women, half Philip Marlowe, half femme fatale, who make their own rules, who think it's entirely possible to save the world while wearing a drop-dead dress and stiletto heels." --Jane Adams